Then you know what slow pace is. But slow is not always bad.
Remember dragging your toes in the river as you sat and read a book in the summer when you had nothing else to do and nowhere else to be? Mmm. I bet you wish you were there now. And what about that walk in the canyon with Mr. or Mz. Perfect? I bet you didn’t want that to go any faster than it did. And then there are the ice cubes in your lemonade when it’s 110 degrees at Lake Powell. They melt way too fast, but you wish they wouldn’t.
You probably know all about fast pace, too.
What about the time you crashed the car or your bike? You hardly had time to react. How about the way you like to ski through pine trees, hoping to just bounce off anything that won’t move out of the way? And then there’s the action movie you saw last week that kept your adrenaline pumping for the full 90 minutes. You were afraid if you looked down at your popcorn, you’d miss something and have to catch up with the plot.
Sometimes you want to control pace in your paper, too. You do this with the same tricks as rhythm—short, quick things for tension and fast pace and long, soft things for relaxation.
The main difference is that pace involves longer stretches of time. Or paper. You can toss in a sentence or two with good rhythm anywhere, but for pace, you have to take the time to establish it. You probably won’t want all short sentences for a fast pace, but you’ll use a few. And you’ll avoid anything too long, like full-page paragraphs. You’ll use parallel constructs and remove any ambiguities that might slow a reader down.
And why will you do all this? Because you know that pace has a major impact on tone. And you know that tone has a major impact on the meaning that readers get from your paper. And you know that the meaning that readers get from your paper determines whether or not you accomplish your purpose, and that accomplishing your purpose is what writing’s all about.
Watch these movies and notice how the length of each dut (comparable to sentence lenth), the camera angle (close-ups comparable to concrete details, wide angle shots comparable to more abstract ideas) influence the mood and the message.
Don’t look for super clear-cut messages, but you’ll probably get a feel for what the video poet was trying ot put across (they were done as an innovative experiment for a poetry class).
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